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| Reflections of a Citizen of Empire – by Jim Phillips Phd., Chair of Peace House Board |
 | | | “Imagine all the people…” | |
Here in Southern Oregon, in the Northwest, and across the United States, there is renewed passion for the idea that security is built on healthy, educated, people able to work together in community, not on marginalizing, criminalizing, and incarcerating people. Many of us are saying clearly that it is far better to spend resources to develop adequate social services for everyone, especially those most in need of them, than to spend resources enlarging prisons and militarizing police. This is a powerful and proven idea that calls for a transformation in thinking and acting, and its time may finally have come. But in essence, it is not a new idea.President Eisenhower (no less!) warned that every gun, tank, and battleship the country makes represents a theft (his word) of the resources we could use to build a healthy and educated future for our children. | | | President Eisenhower | |
At the same time, however, Eisenhower presided over - covert operations that overthrew the elected government of Iran in 1952
- the elected government of Guatemala in 1954
- the elected government of Guyana in 1956, among others.
He continued U.S. support for several quite brutal dictators in Latin America – Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, Somoza in Nicaragua, others – some of whom were later overthrown themselves in popular revolutions. Meanwhile, racial segregation, racial violence, and poverty continued in the U.S. itself. Our best intentions are challenged daily by the need to maintain what has been – in fact if not in name – an empire. Martin Luther King, Jr., warned us about the triple evils of racism, militarism, and consumerism. He said he could not tell young Black men to protest racism nonviolently as long as he was silent about their being drafted to fight a violent war against people of a different race in Vietnam. That war, we recall, was itself the legacy of empire. It began as a war of Vietnamese independence from the French, and was recast as a struggle among essentially imperial powers – Soviet, Chinese, American. As President Johnson (LBJ, not Andrew) was twisting political arms to get the Civil Rights Act through Congress in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the next year, he presided over the massive escalation of U.S. military power in Vietnam. | | | President Johnson | |
The convergence of racism, struggles for racial equality, and the demands of war and empire converged and clashed in that wild year of 1968. We cannot simultaneously run an empire abroad and end racism, militarism, and patriarchy at home. Cedric Robinson, good friend and colleague who taught political and Black Studies at UC-Santa Barbara, used to begin one of his courses by writing on the board, “Race is a myth. Racism is a fact.” The modern idea of race is a product of modern nationalism and empire. The Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French empires from the 1500s to the 1960s all depended on the arbitrary division of people into racial categories. The categories had little to do with biology and much to do with social and political control. Racial categories as we use them are arbitrary, not determined by any biological necessity. But maintaining the separation between the colonizers and the colonized – “we are not like them” – seems to be essential to maintaining an empire. Hierarchy, patriarchy, racism, and greed have been the cornerstones of empire, and military force or threat has been empire’s cement. Criminalization has also been an effective way of separating people, reinforcing racial divisions. Thus, people of color are much more likely to be treated as criminals, and immigrants of color are branded as “illegals.” The United States is a country of immigrants, and it has a love-hate relationship with immigrants. Juan Gonzalez (sometime co-host of Democracy Now) produced a film called Harvest of Empire, in which he showed how much of the immigration from Central America and the Caribbean to the United States over many years consists of people leaving these U.S. “colonies” to find survival or a better life in the U.S. When they arrive, “Illegal alien” is a term of criminalization that awaits them. But asylum seekers are not illegal, neither in a moral nor in a legal sense. They do present us with uncomfortable questions about our national identity and its values, and whether those value are operational and extend to other humans. Running an empire demands militarization of society, both of the colonizer and the colonized. One has a way of seeping into the other. In the U.S. we are arming local and state law enforcement and our Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency with decommissioned military weapons, and with grants from Homeland Secu  rity to buy more weapons and military equipment. (Oregon counties and cities are recipients.) Our domestic law enforcement is increasingly militarized but is perceived as less able to promote the security of all our people, and even as increasingly threatening. That a large percentage of our prisons are run by private for-profit corporations that are paid by our federal government according to the number of humans they can keep incarcerated tells us that our tax dollars are funding what amounts to slavery. Profit depends on keeping people locked up. Militarization, incarceration, criminalization are the requisites and the fruits of empire.
Empires must control people, both their own citizens and others, especially their bodies. This is accomplished through overt and covert racial codes, patriarchy, criminalizing gender and sexual orientation and especially the creation of enemies and threats that must be contained and confined, including the threat of popular social protest. What empires do to others they will inevitably also do to their own citizens. We see it in our racial, gender, and police violence, poor and marginalized neighborhoods, Indian reservations, homeless camps, prisons, detention centers, despair-fueled addiction epidemics, and more. Criminalizing others is what empire demands, but not what we need if we are all to survive and thrive.
In southern Oregon and the Pacific Northwest we have a not-so-hidden history of racial prejudice, militias, and white nationalist and supremacist groups. Almost a century ago, Oregon’s governor, Medford’s mayor, and many members of the Legislature were KKK members or were supported by the Klan. In recent years, we have had the Medford Citizens Bar Association, White Aryan Resistance, the American Front, Oath Keepers, and many more, continuing to the present. These, too, are a symptom of our imperial addiction. Some of these groups have a history of infiltrating law enforcement in our region. Some try to infiltrate peaceful progressive and politically left groups, to incite violence, promote division, and tarnish the image of even progressive causes and movements.
We cannot afford to pursue actions or policies that play into or further divisions in our society. Criticism of violated human rights and opposition to injustice are essential, but they are not meant as weapons of division. Quite the opposite, as MLK, Gandhi – who had a lot of experience dealing with an empire – and so many others have taught. I think criticism of violated rights and opposition to injustice are also not meant to be used as statements of moral superiority, or ways to assuage personal or social guilt. Enemies are what empires want us to create. But this avoidance of making enemies requires a lot of creativity and some risk, and so it is hard but necessary.
Kicking the imperial addiction is hard because it is so much a part of our society, our consumerism, and our ways of thinking. Imperial reach disguises itself as valid and good causes, especially the idea that American values and leadership are necessary for world peace and order. | The United States has approximately 800 formal military bases in 80 countries, a number that could exceed 1,000 if you count troops stationed at embassies and missions and so-called “lily-pond” bases, with some 138,000 soldiers stationed around the globe |
This may be a noble sentiment, but leadership is proven by example, not by military might and economic coercion. If our own country, our region, and our local communities actually exemplified in fact what we preach abroad, we might be believable. Some people have long been aware of how running an empire affects us and distorts our social institutions and our values. Now, recent massive protests against racism, patriarchy, police violence, and more have begun to lay bare these effects to more of us, and have provided another opportune moment for changing our ways of thinking and acting. COVID19 is also part of this new situation. The new normal should not be like the old normal. |
 Jim Phillips, Ph.D. has been visiting, researching, and writing about Central America since 1974. He spent several years during the 1980s in Honduras and Nicaragua during the Contra War, and visited refugee camps in Honduras. He has lived in peasant villages, sugar plantations, and Honduran cities where gang violence is high. He provides expert witness in asylum hearings involving Honduran nationals in U.S. immigration courts. He has written many articles and chapters about refugee populations, human rights, and social change in Central America. His recent book is: Honduras in Dangerous Times: Resistance and Resilience (Lexington Books, 2015, 2017). He is an Affiliate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology (Ret.) at Southern Oregon University, where he taught for 20 years. |
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